Friday, August 20, 2010

Keeping the Future Generation Informed

I just realized that I'm raising an activist.

It's not intentional but everyone knows how vocal I am about my views. When I think that something is wrong I speak up about it.

This morning Walter said we should go to Venice Beach. There's going to be a topless protest over the fact that men can be topless but women can't. That was all it took to get me started. Men have nipples. If the argument is breast size then I see plenty of men that have large breasts, and there are many women with very small breasts. Personally, I don't want to walk around topless; I'm not that comfortable with my after baby belly. But if a women wants to go topless she should have the right. Any law that punishes a woman for something that a man is allowed to do is sexist and should be unconstitutional. I say "should be" because the Equal Rights Amendment was never ratified. You would assume that in 2010 women's right would be constitutionally protected.

Sorry. This is what tends to happen when one of the topics I'm passionate about gets brought up.

Not that women's rights is the only one that gets me going. The recent instances of religious discrimination also get me heated up. A friend asked me why I had written about how a person's religious views don't dictate whether or not they're a good person. Instead of explaining again I'll just include what I told her."I was reading an article on the Islamic cultural center that's going to be built in lower Manhattan, the one that people are calling the 'Ground Zero Mosque'. There's a Christian church that's organizing a Qu'ran burning and saying Muslims are the devil. It's disgusting how so many people are prejudiced against different religions. The vast majority of politicians are various denominations of Christian and plenty of them have their share (and more) of faults. Yet people talk as if Christians haven't done horrible things too. Just because a fraction of a percentage of Muslims are terrorists doesn't mean they all are. Now I'm hearing how Obama supports the "Mosque" when actually what he said was that they have the right to build it, but he won't comment on whether or not he believes they should. Being raised in a Jewish family (on Larry's side) it's frustrating to see my own country so openly discriminating against an entire religion. People have been committing attacks on Muslims and Islamic centers around the country all the while saying that Islam is a religion of violence and that they (the Christian attackers) are peaceful people."

Then there's breastfeeding rights, gay rights, reproductive rights, the war, the American prison system, healthcare (and our lack of a single payer system such as in England and France), a pathetic paid maternity leave system (we have one of the worst in the world), a high rate of maternal and newborn injury and death, 1 in 3 women are having c-sections, physicians ignoring pregnant patient's right to informed refusal, and on.